Common types of bee-hives include those known as Langstroth-types. These include stacked elements of hive bodies and supers. Frequent readings of both the total weight of the hive and of the individual hive bodies would be of great value to the bee keeper in monotoring the progress in the production of honey and in assisting him to manage and control bee-hive activity. The weight of a honey storage super tells how much honey is stored. The day-to-day change indicates the strength of the "honey flow" and this information permits the keeper to timely add supers or remove them. In preparing the hive for winter, weighing is virtually the only practical means for assuring that stores are sufficient for the entire winter or to determine what corrective or supplemental measures may be necessary.
At present, hives are more or less permanently set upon scales in the apiary. Usually only one hive among many is scale-mounted and the assumption is made that the non-mounted hives are in the same condition indicated on the single scale. It is well known that this is a poor assumption.
A second method involves a two men team, or a man with a tripod and pole using "fish-scales" to actually weigh each hive. This method is expensive and clumsy and doesn't readily show the weight of each hive body.
It is accepted that the bees tend to work each frame in the super fairly symetrically in the direction from front to back and, furthermore, they tend to a lesser degree to work from the center frames to those left and right of center. Secondly, if the edge of a hive body or super is raised to create a gap or a space between the lower edge of that super and the upper edge of the next lowert super and that gap is less than 0.160 inches, the bees will not attempt to crawl through.
It is readily apparent that there is a need in the bee-hive field to provide a small, portable scale that can be used to quickly and efficiently take weighings, as desired, of portions of individual bee-hives and in respect to a large number of individual hives.